offences, the sort of divorce that arises out of estrangement and
incompatibilities. But divorce, as it is known in most Christian
countries, has a punitive element, and is obtained through the failure
of one of the parties to observe the conditions of the bond and the
determination of the other to exact suffering. Divorce as it exists at
present is not a readjustment but a revenge. It is the nasty exposure of
a private wrong. In England a husband may divorce his wife for a single
act of infidelity, and there can be little doubt that we are on the eve
of an equalisation of the law in this respect. I will confess I consider
this an extreme concession to the passion of jealousy, and one likely to
tear off the roof from many a family of innocent children. Only
infidelity leading to supposititious children in the case of the wife,
or infidelity obstinately and offensively persisted in or endangering
health in the case of the husband, really injure the home sufficiently
to justify a divorce on the assumptions of our present argument. If we
are going to make the welfare of the children our criterion in these
matters, then our divorce law does in this direction already go too far.
A husband or wife may do far more injury to the home by constantly
neglecting it for the companionship of some outside person with whom no
“matrimonial offence” is ever committed. Of course, if our divorce law
exists mainly for the gratification of the fiercer sexual resentments,
well and good, but if that is so, let us abandon our pretence that
marriage is an institution for the establishment and protection of
homes. And while on the one hand existing divorce laws appear to be
obsessed by sexual offences, other things of far more evil effect upon
the home go without a remedy. There are, for example, desertion,
domestic neglect, cruelty to the children, drunkenness or harmful
drug-taking, indecency of living and uncontrollable extravagance. I
cannot conceive how any logical mind, having once admitted the principle
of divorce, can hesitate at making these entirely home-wrecking things
the basis of effective pleas. But in another direction, some strain of
sentimentality in my nature makes me hesitate to go with the great
majority of divorce-law reformers. I cannot bring myself to agree that
either a long term of imprisonment or the misfortune of insanity should
in itself justify a divorce. I admit the social convenience, but I wince
at the thought of those tragic returns of the dispossessed. So far as
insanity goes, I perceive that the cruelty of the law would but endorse
the cruelty of nature. But I do not like men to endorse the cruelty of
nature.
And, of course, there is no decent-minded person nowadays but wants to
put an end to that ugly blot upon our civilisation, the publication of
whatever is most spicy and painful in divorce-court proceedings. It is
an outrage which falls even more heavily on the innocent than on the
guilty, and which has deterred hundreds of shy and delicate-minded
people from seeking legal remedies for nearly intolerable wrongs. The
sort of person who goes willingly to the divorce court to-day is the
sort of person who would love a screaming quarrel in a crowded street.
The emotional breach of the marriage bond is as private an affair as its
consummation, and it would be nearly as righteous to subject young
couples about to marry to a blustering cross-examination by some
underbred bully of a barrister upon their motives, and then to publish
whatever chance phrases in their answers appeared to be amusing in the
press, as it is to publish contemporary divorce proceedings. The thing
is a nastiness, a steam of social contagion and an extreme cruelty, and
there can be no doubt that whatever other result this British Royal
Commission may have, there at least will be many sweeping alterations.
THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE EMPIRE
§ 1
_If Youth but Knew_, is the title of a book published some years ago,
but still with a quite living interest, by “Kappa.” It is the bitter
complaint of a distressed senior against our educational system. He is
hugely disappointed in the public-school boy, and more particularly in
one typical specimen. He is—if one might hazard a guess—an uncle bereft
of great expectations. He finds an echo in thousands of other distressed
uncles and parents. They use the most divergent and inadequate forms of
expression for this vague sense that the result has not come out good
enough; they put it contradictorily and often wrongly, but the sense is
widespread and real and justifiable, and we owe a great debt to “Kappa”
for an accurate diagnosis of what in the aggregate amounts to a grave
national and social evil.
The trouble with “Kappa’s” particular public-school boy is his unlit
imagination, the apathetic commonness of his attitude to life at large.
He is almost stupidly not interested in the mysteries of material fact,
nor in the riddles and great dramatic movements of history, indifferent
to any form of beauty, and pedantically devoted to the pettiness of
games and clothing and social conduct. It is, in fact, chiefly by his
style in these latter things, his extensive unilluminated knowledge of
Greek and Latin, and his greater costliness, that he differs from a
young carpenter or clerk. A young carpenter or clerk of the same
temperament would have no narrower prejudices nor outlook, no less
capacity for the discussion of broad questions and for imaginative
thinking. And it has come to the mind of “Kappa” as a discovery, as an
exceedingly remarkable and moving thing, a thing to cry aloud about,
that this should be so, that this is all that the best possible modern
education has achieved. He makes it more than a personal issue. He has
come to the conclusion that this is not an exceptional case at all, but
a fair sample of what our upper-class education does for the imagination
of those who must presently take the lead among us. He declares plainly
that we are raising a generation of rulers and of those with whom the
duty of initiative should chiefly reside, who have minds atrophied by
dull studies and deadening suggestions, and he thinks that this is a
matter of the gravest concern for the future of this land and Empire. It
is difficult to avoid agreeing with him either in his observation or in
his conclusion. Anyone who has seen much of undergraduates, or medical
students, or Army candidates, and also of their social subordinates,
must be disposed to agree that the difference between the two classes is
mainly in unimportant things—in polish, in manner, in superficialities
of accent and vocabulary and social habit—and that their minds, in range
and power, are very much on a level. With an invincibly aristocratic
tradition we are failing altogether to produce a leader class adequate
to modern needs. The State is light-headed.
But while one agrees with “Kappa” and shares his alarm, one must confess
the remedies he considers indicated do not seem quite so satisfactory as
his diagnosis of the disease. He attacks the curriculum and tells us we
must reduce or revolutionise instruction and exercise in the dead
languages, introduce a broader handling of history, a more inspiring
arrangement of scientific courses, and so forth. I wish, indeed, it were
possible to believe that substituting biology for Greek prose
composition, or history with models and photographs and diagrams for
Latin versification, would make any considerable difference in this
matter. For so one might discuss this question and still give no offence
to a most amiable and influential class of men. But the roots of the
evil, the ultimate cause of that typical young man’s deadness, lie not
at all in that direction. To indicate the direction in which it does lie
is quite unavoidably to give offence to an indiscriminatingly sensitive
class. Yet there is need to speak plainly. This deadening of soul comes
not from the omission or inclusion of this specific subject or that; it
is the effect of the general scholastic atmosphere. It is an atmosphere
that admits of no inspiration at all. It is an atmosphere from which
living stimulating influences have been excluded, from which stimulating
and vigorous personalities are now being carefully eliminated, and in
which dull, prosaic men prevail invincibly. The explanation of the inert
commonness of “Kappa’s” schoolboy lies not in his having learnt this or
not learnt that, but in the fact that from seven to twenty he has been
in the intellectual shadow of a number of good-hearted, sedulously
respectable, conscientiously manly, conforming, well-behaved men, who
never, to the knowledge of their pupils and the public, at any rate,
think strange thoughts, do imaginative or romantic things, pay tribute
to beauty, laugh carelessly, or countenance any irregularity in the
world. All erratic and enterprising tendencies in him have been checked
by them and brought at last to nothing; and so he emerges a mere
residuum of decent minor dispositions. The dullness of the scholastic
atmosphere, the grey, intolerant mediocrity that is the natural or
assumed quality of every upper-class schoolmaster, is the true cause of
the spiritual etiolation of “Kappa’s” young friend.
Now, it is a very grave thing, I know, to bring this charge against a
great profession—to say, as I do say, that it is collectively and
individually dull. But someone has to do this sooner or later; we have
restrained ourselves and argued away from the question too long. There
is, I allege, a great lack of vigorous and inspiring minds in our
schools. Our upper-class schools are out of touch with the thought of
the time, in a backwater of intellectual apathy. We have no original or
heroic school-teachers. Let me ask the reader frankly what part our
leading headmasters play in his intellectual world; if when some
prominent one among them speaks or writes or talks, he expects anything
more than platitudes and little things? Has he ever turned aside to
learn what this headmaster or that thought of any question that
interested him? Has he ever found freshness or power in a schoolmaster’s
discourse; or found a schoolmaster caring keenly for fine and beautiful
things? Who does not know the schoolmaster’s trite, safe admirations,
his thin, evasive discussion, his sham enthusiasms for cricket, for
fly-fishing, for perpendicular architecture, for boyish traits; his
timid refuge in “good form,” his deadly silences?
And if we do not find him a refreshing and inspiring person, and his
mind a fountain of thought in which we bathe and are restored, is it
likely our sons will? If the schoolmaster at large is grey and dull,
shirking interesting topics and emphatic speech, what must he be like in
the monotonous class-room? These may seem wanton charges to some, but I
am not speaking without my book. Monthly I am brought into close contact
with the pedagogic intelligence through the medium of three educational
magazines. A certain morbid habit against which I struggle in vain makes
me read everything I catch a schoolmaster wanting. I am, indeed, one of
the faithful band who read the Educational Supplement of the _Times_. In
these papers schoolmasters write about their business, lectures upon the
questions of their calling are reported at length, and a sort of invalid
discussion moves with painful decorum through the correspondence column.
The scholastic mind so displayed in action fascinates me. It is like
watching a game of billiards with wooden cushes and beechwood balls.
§ 2
But let me take one special instance. In a periodical, now no longer
living, called the _Independent Review_, there appeared some years ago a
very curious and typical contribution by the Headmaster of Dulwich,
which I may perhaps use as an illustration of the mental habits which
seem inseparably associated with modern scholastic work. It is called
“English Ideas on Education,” and it begins—trite, imitative,
undistinguished—thus:
“The most important question in a country is that of education, and the
most important people in a country are those who educate its
inhabitants. Others have most of the present in their hands: those who
educate have all the future. With the present is bound up all the
happiness only of the utterly selfish and the thoughtless among mankind;
on the future rest all the thoughts of every parent and every wise man
and patriot.”
It is the opening of a boy’s essay. And from first to last this
remarkable composition is at or below that level. It is an entirely
inconclusive paper, it is impossible to understand why it was written;
it quotes nothing, it says nothing about and was probably written in
ignorance of “Kappa” or any other modern contributor to English ideas,
and it occupied about six and a quarter of the large-type pages of this
now vanished _Independent Review_. “English Ideas on Education”!—this
very brevity is eloquent, the more so since the style is by no means
succinct. It must be read to be believed. It is quite extraordinarily
non-prehensile in quality and substance, nothing is gripped and
maintained and developed; it is like the passing of a lax hand over the
surfaces of disarranged things. It is difficult to read, because one’s
mind slips over it and emerges too soon at the end, mildly puzzled
though incurious still as to what it is all about. One perceives Mr.
Gilkes through a fog dimly thinking that Greek has something vital to do
with “a knowledge of language and man,” that the classical master is in
some mysterious way superior to the science man and more imaginative,
and that science men ought not to be worried with the Greek that is too
high for them; and he seems, too, to be under the odd illusion that “on
all this” Englishmen “seem now to be nearly in agreement,” and also on
the opinion that games are a little overdone and that civic duties and
the use of the rifle ought to be taught. Statements are made—the sort of
statements that are suffered in an atmosphere where there is no swift,
fierce opposition to be feared; frill out into vague qualifications and
butt gently against other partially contradictory statements. There is a
classification of minds—the sort of classification dear to the Y. M. C.
A. essayists, made for the purposes of the essay and unknown to
psychology. There are, we are told, accurate, unimaginative, ingenious
minds capable of science and kindred vulgar things (such was
Archimedes), and vague, imaginative minds, with the gift for language
and for the treatment of passion and the higher indefinable things (such
as Homer and Mr. Gilkes), and, somehow, this justifies those who are
destined for “science” in dropping Greek. Certain “considerations,”
however, loom inconclusively upon this issue—rather like interested
spectators of a street fight in a fog. For example, to learn a language
is valuable “in proportion as the nation speaking it is great”—a most
empty assertion; and “no languages are so good,” for the purpose of
improving style, “as the exact and beautiful languages of Rome and
Greece.”
Is it not time at least that this last, this favourite but threadbare
article of the schoolmaster’s creed was put away for good? Everyone who
has given any attention to this question must be aware that the
intellectual gesture is entirely different in highly inflected languages
such as Greek and Latin and in so uninflected a language as English,
that learning Greek to improve one’s English style is like learning to
swim in order to fence better, and that familiarity with Greek seems
only too often to render a man incapable of clear, strong expression in
English at all. Yet Mr. Gilkes can permit this old assertion, so dear to
country rectors and the classical scholar, to appear within a column’s
distance of such style as this:
“It is now understood that every subject is valuable, if it is properly
taught; it will perform that which, as follows from the accounts given
above of the aim of education, is the work most important in the case of
boys—that is, it will draw out their faculties and make them useful in
the world, alert, trained in industry, and able to understand, so far as
their school lessons educated them, and make themselves master of any
subject set before them.”
This quotation is conclusive.
§ 3
I am haunted by a fear that the careless reader will think I am writing
against upper-class schoolmasters. I am, it is undeniable, writing
against their dullness, but it is, I hold, a dullness that is imposed
upon them by the conditions under which they live. Indeed, I believe,
could I put the thing directly to the profession—“Do you not yourselves
feel needlessly limited and dull?”—I should receive a majority of
affirmative responses. We have, as a nation, a certain ideal of what a
schoolmaster must be; to that he must by art or nature approximate, and
there is no help for it but to alter our ideal. Nothing else of any wide
value can be done until that is done.
In the first place, the received ideal omits a most necessary condition.
We do not insist upon a headmaster, or indeed any of our academic
leaders and dignitaries, being a man of marked intellectual character, a
man of intellectual distinction. It is assumed, rather lightly in many
cases, that he has done “good work,” as they say—the sort of good work
that is usually no good at all, that increases nothing, changes nothing,
stimulates no one, leads no whither. That, surely, must be altered. We
must see to it that our leading schoolmasters at any rate must be men of
insight and creative intelligence, men who could at a pinch write a good
novel or produce illuminating criticism or take an original part in
theological or philosophical discussion, or do any of these minor
things. They must be authentic men, taking a line of their own and
capable of intellectual passion. They should be able to make their mark
outside the school, if only to show they carry a living soul into it. As
things are, nothing is so fatal to a schoolmaster’s career as to do
that.
And closely related to this omission is our extreme insistence upon what
we call high moral character, meaning, really, something very like an
entire absence of moral character. We insist upon tact, conformity, and
an unblemished record. Now, in these days of warring opinion, these days
of gigantic, strange issues that cannot possibly be expressed in the
formulæ of the smaller times that have gone before, tact is evasion,
conformity formality, and silence an unblemished record, mere evidence
of the damning burial of a talent of life. The sort of man into whose
hands we give our sons’ minds must never have experimented morally or
thought at all freely or vigorously about, for example, God, Socialism,
the Mosaic account of the Creation, social procedure, republicanism,
beauty, love, or, indeed, about anything likely to interest an
intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such things he must have
acquired the habit of the modest cough, the infectious trick of the nice
evasion. How can “Kappa” expect inspiration from the decorous resultants
who satisfy these conditions? What brand can ever be lit at altars that
have borne no fire? And you find the secondary schoolmaster who complies
with these restrictions becoming the zealous and grateful agent of the
tendencies that have made him what he is, converting into a practice
those vague dreads of idiosyncrasy, of positive acts and new ideas, that
dictated the choice of him and his rule of life. His moral teaching
amounts to this: to inculcate truth-telling about small matters and
evasion about large, and to cultivate a morbid obsession in the
necessary dawn of sexual consciousness. So far from wanting to stimulate
the imagination, he hates and dreads it. I find him perpetually haunted
by a ridiculous fear that boys will “do something,” and in his terror
seeking whatever is dull and unstimulating and tiring in intellectual
work, clipping their reading, censoring their periodicals, expurgating
their classics, substituting the stupid grind of organised “games” for
natural, imaginative play, persecuting loafers—and so achieving his end
and turning out at last, clean-looking, passively well-behaved,
apathetic, obliterated young men, with the nicest manners and no spark
of initiative at all, quite safe not to “do anything” for ever.
I submit this may be a very good training for polite servants, but it is
not the way to make masters in the world. If we English believe we are
indeed a masterful people, we must be prepared to expose our children to
more and more various stimulations than we do; they must grow up free,
bold, adventurous, initiated, even if they have to take more risks in
the doing of that. An able and stimulating teacher is as rare as a fine
artist, and is a thing worth having for your son, even at the price of
shocking your wife by his lack of respect for that magnificent
compromise, the Establishment, or you by his Socialism or by his
Catholicism or Darwinism, or even by his erroneous choice of ties and
collars. Boys who are to be free, masterly men must hear free men
talking freely of religion, of philosophy, of conduct. They must have
heard men of this opinion and that, putting what they believe before
them with all the courage of conviction. They must have an idea of will
prevailing over form. It is far more important that boys should learn
from original, intellectually keen men than they should learn from
perfectly respectable men, or perfectly orthodox men, or perfectly nice
men. The vital thing to consider about your son’s schoolmaster is
whether he talked lifeless twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and not
whether he loved unwisely or was born of poor parents, or was seen
wearing a frock-coat in combination with a bowler, or confessed he
doubted the Apostles’ Creed, or called himself a Socialist, or any
disgraceful thing like that, so many years ago. It is that sort of thing
“Kappa” must invert if he wants a change in our public schools. You may
arrange and rearrange curricula, abolish Greek, substitute “science”—it
will not matter a rap. Even those model canoes of yours, “Kappa,” will
be wasted if you still insist upon model schoolmasters. So long as we
require our schoolmasters to be politic, conforming, undisturbing men,
setting up Polonius as an ideal for them, so long will their influence
deaden the souls of our sons.
THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD
Some few years ago the Fabian Society, which has been so efficient in
keeping English Socialism to the lines of “artfulness and the
’eighties,” refused to have anything to do with the Endowment of
Motherhood. Subsequently it repented and produced a characteristic
pamphlet in which the idea was presented with a sort of minimising
furtiveness as a mean little extension of outdoor relief. These Fabian
Socialists, instead of being the daring advanced people they are
supposed to be, are really in many things twenty years behind the times.
There need be nothing shamefaced about the presentation of the Endowment
of Motherhood. There is nothing shameful about it. It is a plain and
simple idea for which the mind of the man in the street has now been
very completely prepared. It has already crept into social legislation
to the extent of thirty shillings.
I suppose if one fact has been hammered into us in the past two decades
more than any other it is this: that the supply of children is falling
off in the modern State; that births, and particularly good-quality
births, are not abundant enough; that the birth-rate, and particularly
the good-class birth-rate, falls steadily below the needs of our future.
If no one else has said a word about this important matter, ex-President
Roosevelt would have sufficed to shout it to the ends of the earth.
Every civilised community is drifting towards “race-suicide” as Rome
drifted into “race-suicide” at the climax of her empire.
Well, it is absurd to go on building up a civilisation with a dwindling
supply of babies in the cradles—and these not of the best possible
sort—and so I suppose there is hardly an intelligent person in the
English-speaking communities who has not thought of some possible
remedy—from the naïve scoldings of Mr. Roosevelt and the more stolid of
the periodicals to sane and intelligible legislative projects.